Dickens, Violence and the Modern StateDreams of the Scaffold

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Drawing on the theories of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, this book places Dickens within the discourse circulating within his society, in particular those associated with modernity. Focusing on his novels written after 1848, his relationship to modernity can be seen in his treatment of violence.

In this reassessment of Dickens, the author draws on the theories of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, in addition to Julia Kristeva and Edward Said, to situate Dickens within the discourses circulating within his society - in particular those associated with modernity. Focusing on Dickens's novels written after 1848, his relationship to modernity can be seen in his treatment of violence, seen in two forms in his writing: that of the state (in the rationalizing powers of Victorian bourgeois modernization), and physical violence, as portrayed in Dickens's criminals and interest in masochism and corpses.

Acknowledgements - A Note on References - Introduction: Dickens and the Dream of Scaffolds - Prison Bound: Dickens, Foucault and Great Expectations - 'An Impersonation of the Wintry Eighteen-Hundred and Forty-Six': Dombey and Son - 'A Paralysed Dumb Witness': Allegory in Bleak House - The Password in Little Dorrit - Dickens and Dostoyevsky: Capital Punishment in Barnaby Rudge, A Tale of Two Cities and The Idiot - From Jane Eyre to Governor Eyre: or Oliver Twist to Edwin Drood - The Scum of Humanity: Our Mutual Friend - Index